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Update on my app

So I was hoping to be done last week (before I got back to work) however, I wasn’t. Its started and I’m really far along though! Just starting and blogging about it was definitely a motivator, so I’m blogging about its progress again to keep myself on track.

TLDR: I learned to use a prototyping tool for iOS development. I’m hoping to have a working prototype next week.

What challenges did I run into building the app that quickly?

Surprisingly, at least to me, it was design! The reason I say that is because as a long time web developer I am used to prototyping web application ideas by simply throwing a backend together and then pages that basically have the functionality I need, but no real layout. Since its a web app. I usually have content and links. Making updates to it to eventually bring the design and user experience in – isn’t very difficult.

However, this way of working fell apart very quickly with iOS.

I couldn’t just throw data on the page and create a link to the next page. I had to consider how the data was being presented. I also had to consider how the transition from one page to another occurred. With a webpage, its a link. That’s it. With iOS, I could be in a navigation controller like Mail, I could bring up a modal window, or I could even animate and flip the screen like a Weather app. These decisions had to be made up front otherwise it was going to be harder and harder to change later – harder = time = expensive.

So I stepped back and started laying out the application in a prototyping tool. I started using Storyboards right in iOS. They were ok, but the process wasn’t creative enough. It wasn’t free flowing and building and running seemed time consuming.

AppCooker worked really well for me. Its an iPad app that lets you build out an entire iOS application and run through it. I can create clickable zones, choose transitions and I can try navigational constructs cheaply and throw them away if they don’t work. The best part is I can send the tappable prototype to someone. All they have to do is download AppTaster from the app store and try it out.

Once I had a working tappable prototype it made it much easier to build it out in Xcode. This was a big lesson learned for me for iOS development. I’ve used prototyping before on web development projects, but I haven’t always had to start there. I feel like its a mandatory starting point for iOS.

When am I going to show this thing off?

Soon! As soon as I have a working prototype I will make a video and walk through it – posting that here for you to see.